Lucene/Solr Revolution 2015

1. O C T O B E R 1 3 - 1 6 , 2 0 1 6 • A U S T I N , T X

2. Evolving to Open
Adopting Apache Solr for the Red Hat Customer Portal
Chris Bredesen
Manager, Software Engineering at Red Hat
@cbredesen

3. 01
Hello!
$ rm -rf agenda
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4. About Red Hat
● Largest open source company
● Subscription model
● Communities matter

5. Red Hat Customer Portal
● Apps, services & content
● Delivers subscriber value
● On-site search is critical

6. Search Infrastructure 1.0

7. Search Infrastructure 1.1
● More content from new sources
● Attempts to optimize crawling using
pushed feeds
● Desire for index-based browse UI

8. Growing Pains
● 150K+ documents w/per-document
licensing
● Want to add 10M+ more :-o
● OK for turn-key; lacks customizability
● Not suitable for browse
● Click-through not stellar
● Proprietary “black box”

9. Lucene
● Highly tuned recommendation engine
● Narrow focus, deep integration
● Back-testable against all
cases/solutions
● Success!

10. Search Infrastructure 2.0

11. Challenges
● Web search successful
● Internal search failed – crash and
burn on tokens like CVE-2001-001
● Underestimated indexer dev effort
● Indexers misbehaving has larger
impact
● Solr Java issues @ 10X load

12. Results
● Click through rate sustained @ 2X
● Query response consistently sub-
second (including our auth layer)
● Developers thrilled with API
2.0 Release

13. Future Plans
● Replace some custom indexer code with Fusion
● Signals API for active tuning
● Admin tooling for tuning, elevation, synonyms/spell-check

14. Discussion
Q&A